


you must remember this

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Family Feels, Fred is a good dad, M/M, Small Towns, Writing, bruce springsteen independence day.mp3 plays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 21:33:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12566652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: they play this game.you must remember this, jughead calls it in his head, thinking of the the song from casablanca. it’s a game of trading memories. they play it because remembering things is something to talk about, something besides how scared they are. they play it over pancakes in the morning whenever jughead’s visiting the andrews, batting memories back and forth like softballs.on permanence, and storytelling, and being okay again.





	you must remember this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ohmygodwhy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmygodwhy/gifts).



 

> _You must remember this_
> 
> _A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh._
> 
> _The fundamental things apply_
> 
> _As time goes by._
> 
> \- “As Time Goes By”, from Casablanca, 1942.
> 
>  
> 
> “If you build it, they will come.”
> 
> \- Field of Dreams, 1989

 

they play this game. _you must remember this_ , jughead calls it in his head, thinking of the the song from casablanca. it’s a game of trading memories. they play it because remembering things is something to talk about, something besides how scared they are. they play it over pancakes in the morning whenever jughead’s visiting the andrews, batting memories back and forth like softballs.

fred says: do you remember how I used to rake up the leaves every fall into piles and pretend I wasn't looking while you two came along and jumped in them. we used to do that all day.

jughead says: do you remember when archie and i were playing making magic potions and we emptied the whole spice rack and all the glitter glue into our potion and then spilled it on the rug. you let us take a bath together.

archie says: i remember that. jughead spilled water everywhere and i got in trouble.

they always feel better after, briefly. they play it out of some deep human compulsion to share, to make real the things that have been good in their lives, to keep the darkness at bay. sometimes it works.

fred says now: ‘do you remember when you guys used to ask for bedtime stories at sleepovers? you wouldn’t let me go to bed until i made up the most elaborate mystery. i’d use you two as the main characters. archie would pitch a fit if i didn’t make him the hero. i had to make up _pureheart the powerful_ so he’d stop whining’  

the thing is, jughead doesn't get tired of storytelling. he sits with fred a lot, because fred’s lips are a lot looser on painkillers than without, and he listens. a lot of fred’s fp stories are high school ones: blue and gold and happy, yearbook-sleek, the people they used to be. fp plays the winning athlete, the prankster, the cool guy: held aloft forever, suspended on the shoulders of his teammates, the sun in his hair. jughead treasures these, even if they’re no more real to him than the ones about superheroes. it’s hard to put them together in his mind: his dad the happy seventeen year old and his dad as he knows him now.

fred was there when jughead was born. he finds it oddly painful to know this, that at one point fp had wanted to share an event of that magnitude with fred. fred tells the story in a way that privileges fp’s happiness, tells jughead how excited he had been, how he’d cried happy tears. jughead can’t picture this one either. he wants to more than he’s ever wanted anything, but he can’t.

his novel stays unfinished. he doesn’t know how to wrap it up, because this thing has ended, but none of it really ends. he doesn’t want to immortalize the way fred’s hands shake on the railing, the haunted, hating look in archie’s eyes all the time. doesn’t want this to be permanent.

they’re on the couch in the living room. fred puts an ice pack over the bruises he got from falling in the shower, asks jughead to remind him when it’s been ten minutes. if it had been archie’s injury he would have wrapped it in a towel first, the thing you’re supposed to do when applying ice, but fred just slaps the gel pack on his leg like he’s punishing himself for being hurt. winces and doesn’t wince at the same time.

the bruises are ugly: a kaleidoscope galaxy of purple-yellow-black up the side of his thigh. it had been more of a faint than a slip. jughead thinks being a grown-up is dangerous, sometimes. there had been no one to chew him out for showering when the doctor had told him only baths, so fred had done it. fred closes his eyes. he’ll walk on it later to get archie’s dinner started. he’ll walk on it tuesday when archie drives him to his physical therapy, the doctor pressing down on each of his legs and asking _does it hurt_ , fred maybe saying no and maybe saying yes because anyone who’s proud enough to faint in the shower is proud enough to lie. fp does it all the time. jughead’s caught himself at it now and again.

jughead sits with him now. fred has his eyes closed, his skin very white, his face drawn in pain. his pain is heroic, somehow, the fact of fred stoic, and sick, and scared, but for archie’s benefit. single parents don’t get sick days, don’t have time to pass out in their shower’s warm water. jughead remembers the stomach flu archie had got for three weeks in freshman year, about a half-year after mary left. fred had shown up to school for archie’s homework, his eyes circled in purple, his skin a waxen grey-green colour jughead had never seen on a person.

 _just a little under the weather_ , he had said, because he was obviously unwell. _archie’s worse. can i have his algebra?_

jughead had pictured him driving home, pulling over on the shoulder to throw up, or maybe doing it inside the truck because of that pride thing, one of the garbage bags he keeps shoved in the glove compartment. going home to change archie’s sheets and make archie soup and wash out that red pail fred kept around for jughead and archie to upchuck in, crouching in the hot bathroom on shaking legs. going back to work while he was still sick because he’d knocked out his sick days and vacation days at the beginning of archie’s illness, when archie needed him most.

jughead sits with him now, asks, like everyone, if he’s okay.

yeah, says fred, like he’s tired of answering. fine. i’m fine.

 

* * *

 

it was fred who showed him casablanca for the first time, the two of them settled in in the den with a pair of cokes, their feet up on the coffee table in the way mary would have frowned at. fred tells him about the movie the usual suspects, how the title is a line from casablanca. jughead promises to watch it sometime, and fred says he’ll lend it to him.

fred wouldn’t call himself a movie buff, but he’s toeing the line, maybe the way all dads do, like you spring into fatherhood with a little bit of film history in you, pre-formed opinions on the godfather ii and the wizard of oz. fp’s never cared about movies, but he knows what blade runner’s about. later jughead will find out he saw it back in high school because fred rented it for them. later still he’ll find out that that means fp wasn't doing a whole lot of watching.

it’s fred who had suggested maybe he wants to go to that talk they’re having at riverdale high, the one before everything happens that summer, some guy who graduated riverdale and is making movies now, movies that go to festivals and get written up about. it’s big news because no one ever does anything real special out of riverdale, and every little success is a big one.

jughead goes, because he can tell fred thinks maybe his future is in the movies. jughead isn’t so sure he has a future at all, anywhere, but it feels good to have people thinking he does.

the boy who gives the presentation looks nothing like jughead had expected him to look like: he is plain, solemn, self-important as a disguise for nerves. he tells them about his degree: he’s in his last year and the future unknown is creeping up on him. he has been successful but has not, as they say, _broken in_. that’s okay, he tells them, he’s not interested in that. he’s made it farther than his peers, but he’s still afraid. nothing is certain.

one of his short films was well acclaimed, had good success at a film festival. he followed it up with another one, that did another festival circuit. he’s made a good few more, subsiding off community arts grants and a part time job, and thinks he’s found his niche. he’s writing a screenplay now, in the hopes of showing it to someone, just in case. he has had his name in a few small movie magazines. someone to look out for. if you google him something comes up, and not just a linkedin either. something real.

the question period is sparse and dismaying. no, he doesn’t have any new work. he is making small films for very little reward. but he is happy, if not fully fulfilled. jughead wonders if he’s lonely here, back in this small town at his alma mater. wonders if the people at his school envy him, if they know what it is they’re wishing for.

he speaks well: you can hear the college in his vocabulary, but not his tone. he keeps tugging anxiously at the lapels of his suitjacket. jughead thinks about him going home after: texting his friends, yeah, it went well, place looks the same as ever. going to sleep in his parents house, how they were probably overjoyed to have him back even though greendale was just across the river.

jughead doesn’t think that’s what he wants to be. the problem is, he doesn’t know what he wants to be. only knows what he doesn’t, and even that is tenuous: some days he wants to be his father’s son. other days he doesn’t at all.

so he understands what that guy’s going through, maybe. he sits in his room a lot, tracing the outline of his phone with his thumb, hovering over his mother’s contact, always waiting, never pressing call.

the thing is, anyone can be tragic, or profound, or beautiful in this place. the smallness of them makes people into mythos: there are local heroes and there are local nobodies, both of them poignant and astounding in equal measure. he googles fred andrews’ name one day and is somehow reassured when there is something there, proof that he existed, meant something, even if it’s just a local result. fourth from the bottom: the register’s online website. a coverage of the shooting. there are a dizzying amount of fred andrewses (and freds, and andrews) whose facebook profiles come up, but none of them are the right one. his fred does not have facebook. probably never will.

 

* * *

 

their winter is long, damp, and cold.

the library is still open. the southside branch is graffitied and dingy, but running. the fred andrewses of the world have not let it die, have cried for public access to books, for children’s access to education.

jughead goes there a lot, to do homework, to stare at his unfinished novel. he used to read books about screenwriting - the southside branch has two, both dog-eared and published somewhere around martin scorcese’s seventh birthday - but more and more now he reads the town journals. old histories. the origins of the town with pep.

these books are always accompanied by pictures. the one he’s looking at now shows a workers strike outside the sports field: unfair working conditions in the bottling plant factory. ‘i was there’, fred had said once, playing his own game of _remember when_ for a time jughead is too young to understand. jughead looks for him among the picketers, but doesn't see him. or sees him and doesn't recognize him.

he reads old editions of _the red and black_ at school. they're not very good - a lot of bias, a lot of spelling errors- but there's an earnestness in them he likes, an urgency. a kind of pride, even among the stories about drug deals and stabbings and football losses. he recognizes it: the desire to tell, to matter. to put yourself out there into the world.

he visits his dad every sunday. he thinks about fathers a lot, lately, and sons. how fp begs him all the time to not end up the way he did, and especially not here. that fp’s dad used to abuse the shit out of him (fp’s words, not his own) and how fp’s never laid a hand on him, even in his worst rages, and if that means anything at all. how hard fred’s working to leave something better behind for archie, working until it shaves him down into nothing, working for something he’ll never touch or see. jughead thinks about that. that maybe at the end fathers are just ghosts for their sons to inherit.

archie doesn’t know much about his paternal grandpa, only that he died when archie was young and fred doesn’t talk about it because it makes him sad to. archie isn’t even sure how he died, heart attack, he thinks, or cancer or something, saying it like that: _or something_ , cancer or one of those other diseases that kill people’s grandpas. the way they do. archie is stubbornly, obstinately young.

jughead makes himself tragic, because somehow he feels it makes him worthwhile. thinks a lot about the half year he spent homeless, because other people struggling around you makes you want to prove you were hurting too, remember the bad parts. but sleeping in a projection booth isn’t the same as being shot, or raped, so he doesn’t talk about it much. keeps the dreams he has to himself.

‘fred’s tough’ fp tells him through the bars of his prison cell. ‘he’s been through worse.’ jughead wants to ask what’s worse than being shot, but he holds his tongue. fred is tough. he’s up and walking, he’s laughing again, trying to be what archie needs. even made dinner the other night, before the shower thing happened. now archie won’t let him get up off the couch, but fred’s spirit is still there. he’s still being tough.

jughead sits and watches him. tries to imagine how scary it must be to wake up on the floor of a shower with your blood running down the drain. remembers fred raking leaves up into piles just for them to jump in, doing it over and over and over, no end in sight. over and over and over.

 

* * *

  
  
gladys used to tell him bedtime stories: she was the one who taught him how to listen, how to hear. when he used to ask his dad for a bedtime story he used to get sports coverage. he wonders if she’s doing it for jellybean, out in toledo. what kind of stories she has left to tell.

sometimes he wants to ask fp for one now. he’d even take a sports story: sports stories are stories too, the stories of all the little blurry-faced people on the tv screen that fp knows as if by name, talks about them with a fondness that makes jughead sorry he hadn’t stuck with his little league career. he thinks maybe fp hates them too, though, used to get this look in his eye whenever they’d pass the loaded coach bus painted with the riverdale state colours on the way to some football game. fred likes hollywood sports stories: jughead comes by on saturday evening and finds him asleep in front of _field of dreams_. he thinks it’s fitting for fred, the builder.

fred doesn’t mind endings. he’s been alive long enough to know they’re a fact of life. he has stories to tell about the drive-in, but they will be just that now, stories, and fred doesn’t mind. it’s jughead who doesn’t like endings. hadn’t wanted the last picture show to go on.

it’s just that he thinks it’s his fault, sometimes. that fp’s life turned out the way it did. that he can’t conflate the happy, thriving fp that fred talks about with the fp who used to throw bottles at the wall. kids cost money and hearing aids cost money and it takes away pieces of you. fp had dreams, once. plans for his life. he doesn’t have anything now.

he remembers all that time after the hospital but before his dad turned to the serpents, when he’d find fp in the evenings watching college ball, lit only by the screen glow. fp roots for people like the man he used to be, the man he maybe thought he’d be. jughead thinks all the movies have it wrong. jocks feel as much and as deeply as the other kids do.

the thing is: he’s seen the way his dad has looked at fred for years. and it hasn’t gone away. fp brings him up whenever jughead comes to visit, until jughead can’t take it anymore and asks him outright for all of it. that’s the story he’s been waiting for on those visits with fred, anyways, the fred-and-fp story. beginning to end.

jughead sits with him that day, pulls the truth out of him in tiny pieces. yes, we were together, all those years ago, yes, it was physical. we trusted each other. loved each other. i broke his heart. it was for his own good. fp includes the sports coverage: first base, second base, third base, home. home in the back of a blue and white van aptly named the _shaggin wagon_. home wherever fred took him.

jughead apologizes in the right places, nods in the rest of them, doesn’t interrupt. he regrets asking at some point, just for his father’s sake, but you can’t take things back around here. fp doesn’t look like he wants to talk anymore once he’s done, stares evenly into jughead’s gaze but doesn’t speak. jughead thanks his dad for his time, promises to come back really soon. he’s halfway to the door when he hears the rough, trembling sob that makes him pause.

jughead turns around. fp is standing at the very edge of his cell, arms hanging through the bars, eyes glistening with tears.

‘I would have loved him,’ he says, and that’s all he says. ‘I would have loved him so well.’


End file.
